A timely coffee hack

It’s somewhat ironic that just as Ubuntu readies itself for the starting wave of smart connected devices, my latest hardware hack was in fact a disconnected one. In my defense, it’s quite important for these smart devices to preserve a convenient physical interface with the user, so this one was a personal lesson on that.

Continue reading

Posted in Assembly, Hardware, Project | 2 Comments

Inline maps in gopkg.in/yaml.v2

After the updates to gopkg.in itself, it’s time for gopkg.in/yaml.v2 to receive some attention. The following improvements are now available in the yaml package:

Continue reading

Posted in Go, Project | Leave a comment

No minor versions in Go import paths

This post provides the background for a deliberate and important decision in the design of gopkg.in that people often wonder about: while the service does support full versions in tag and branch names (as in “v1.2” or “v1.2.3”), the URL must contain only the major version (as in “gopkg.in/mgo.v2”) which gets mapped to the best matching version in the repository.

Continue reading

Posted in Article, Design, Go, Project | Leave a comment

Improvements on gopkg.in

Early last year the gopkg.in service was introduced with the goal of encouraging Go developers to establish strategies that enable existent software to remain working while package APIs evolve. After the initial discussions and experimentation that went into defining the (simple) design and feature set of the service, it’s great to see that the approach is proving reasonable in practice, with steady growth in usage. Meanwhile, the service has been up and unchanged for several months while we learned more about which areas needed improvement.

Continue reading

Posted in Go, Project | Leave a comment

Holiday hardware hacks

Last night I did a trivial yet surprisingly satisfying hardware hack, of the kind that can only be accomplished when the brain is in holiday mode. Our son has that very simple airplane toy, which turned out to become one of his most loved ones, enough to have deserved wheel repairs before. He’s also reportedly a fan of all kinds of light-emitting or reflecting objects (including the sun, and specially the moon). So the idea sparkled: how easily can that airplane get a blinking led?

With an attiny85, a CR2032 battery, a LED, and half an hour of soldering work, this was the result:

Continue reading

Posted in Assembly, Hardware, Project, Snippet | Leave a comment

mgo r2014.10.12

A new release of the mgo MongoDB driver for Go is out, packed with contributions and features. But before jumping into the change list, there’s a note in the release of MongoDB 2.7.7 a few days ago that is worth celebrating:

New Tools!
– The MongoDB tools have been completely re-written in Go
– Moved to a new repository: https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-tools
– Have their own JIRA project: https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/TOOLS

So far this is part of an unstable release of the MongoDB server, but it implies that if the experiment works out every MongoDB server release will be carrying client tools developed in Go and leveraging the mgo driver. This extends the collaboration with MongoDB Inc. (mgo is already in use in the MMS product), and some of the features in release r2014.10.12 were made to support that work.

The specific changes available in this release are presented below. These changes do not introduce compatibility issues, and most of them are new features.

Continue reading

Posted in Go, MongoDB, Project | Leave a comment

Packing resources into Go qml binaries

The qml package is right now one of the best choices for creating graphic applications under the Go language. Part of the reason why this is true comes from the convenience of QML, a high-level domain-specific language that allows describing visual components, events, animations, and content in general in a succinct and pleasing way. The integration of such a language with Go means having both a good mechanism for describing visual content, and a good platform for doing general development under, which can range from simple data manipulation to involved OpenGL content rendering.

On the practical side, one of the implications of using such a language partnership is that every Go qml application will have some sort of resource content to deal with, carrying the QML logic. Such content may be loaded either from files on disk, or from strings in memory. Loading from a file means the content may be organized in multiple files that directly reference each other without changing the Go application, and may be updated and tested without rebuilding. Loading from a string in memory means the content needs to be self-contained, but results in a standalone binary (linking aside – still depends on Qt libraries).

Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Design, Go, Project | 2 Comments

Announcing yaml v2 for Go

There were a few long standing issues in the yaml.v1 package which were being postponed so that they could be done at once in a single incompatible change, and the time has come: yaml.v2 is now available.

Besides these incompatible changes, other compatible fixes and improvements were performed in that push, and those were also applied to the existing yaml.v1 package so that dependent applications benefit immediately and without modifications.

The subtopics below outline exactly what changed, and how to adapt existent code when necessary.

Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, Design, Go, Project, Snippet | Leave a comment

The new Go qml OpenGL API

As detailed in the preliminary release of qml.v1 for Go a couple of weeks ago, my next task was to finish the improvements in its OpenGL API. Good progress has happened since then, and the new API is mostly done and available for experimentation. At the same time, there’s still work to do on polishing edges and on documenting the extensive API. This blog post aims to present the improvements made, their internal design, and also to invite help for finishing the pending details.

Before diving into the new, let’s first have a quick look at how a Go application using OpenGL might look like with qml.v0. This is an excerpt from the old painting example:

Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, C/C++, Design, Go, Project, Snippet | Leave a comment

Announcing qml v1 for Go

After a few weeks of slow progress on the qml package for Go, action is starting again.

The first important change is the release of the new v1 API, which is motivated by conversations and debugging sessions we’ve had at GopherCon back in April. The problem being solved is that Mac OS requires its graphic activities to be held in the first thread in the running process, and that’s incompatible with the API provided by the qml package in v0.

In practice, code in v0 looked like this:
Continue reading

Posted in Architecture, C/C++, Design, Go, Project, Snippet | Leave a comment